Category talk:Vice Presidential Candidates (OTL)
Johnson, Knox, LeMay, Lodge, Roosevelt, and Warren (forgot about him) were all nominated for Vice President and lost in the general election in OTL. JFK sought the nomination at the 1956 DNC but lost out to Estes Kefauver. JPK and Hamlin lost in alternate timelines. Does the category as it's now written stand, or does it need subdivision? Turtle Fan 21:14, September 27, 2009 (UTC) :Does JFK fit here? From what you say, he sought the nomination from his party but didn't get it so he never ran as a candidate. Instead he was a candidate to be a candidate. ML4E 05:04, October 1, 2009 (UTC) ::Well that depends on how we're defining "ran for Vice President." That was back when the lower half of the ticket was often formally contested at the national convention (though the nominee was not democratically chosen) as opposed to these days, when all you can do is kiss the presidential nominee's ass and try to encourage good press about how helpful you will be to circulate. So he mounted a campaign, just as, say, HRC mounted a Presidential campaign last year even though she never got the nomination. ::Now if we want to limit this category to those who were nominated for Vice President and lost in the general election, that would be valid, and we would remove Kennedy. Turtle Fan 10:53, October 1, 2009 (UTC) :::I made an argument that Presidential Candidates should include both the nominees and those who sought the nomination. I'd probably not make the same argument here. The race for the nomination for the Prez is about as hardfought as the actual election. VP, maybe once, but no so much anymore. Moreover, who ever remembers when person x ran for the VP nomination? ::::I'm always amused when presidential candidates use the short list as an instrument of political patronage. More than one potentially dangerous intra-party rough spot has been smoothed over by a presumptive nominee saying "I'll create the appearance that I'm seriously considering you, even though I'm not." And they they, the short-listers who've been bought off, go out and brag about it! ::::But it has been significant from time to time, and I'm not talking about times presidents died in office and were succeeded, and the AH potential of having had them choose differently, or of the what-ifs that come of nipping very influential VPs like Cheney in the bud. ::::The failure of Hannibal Hamlin to be renominated in 1864 led to some of the Radical Republicans withdrawing support from Lincoln and giving Fremont another try. Had that election been as close as it was looking before Atlanta fell, that little bit just might have been enough to undo Lincoln in a couple of swing states. ::::In 1896 the Populists, who had been emerging as a real force to be reckoned with and might even have been starting us down the road to a three-party system, nominated Bryan but not Arthur Sewall as his running mate, choosing Thomas Watson instead. Thus, votes for the Bryan-Watson ticket had to be counted seperately from votes for the Bryan-Sewall ticket, which hurt the Democrats a quarter million votes (not nearly enough to save young Bryan had he had them) and, more importantly, finished off the party: Democrats and Republicans had both been courting them as allies, but now the Democrats were through with them because they'd been screwed, and the Republicans didn't want them because they'd nominated Bryan. ::::And the afore-mentioned 1956 bid really helped kick off Kennedy's national mystique. It was a significant step for his career. As you said, the excitement over the vice-presidential candidates is a thing of the past, but if we're writing about historical figures. . . . Turtle Fan 19:06, October 1, 2009 (UTC) :::Incidentally, Erich Ludendorff has made an appearance in the Presidential candidates column. Not sure if that may need a nationality split much as it does an ATL/OTL split. And I also submit that the name of the category could be more specific, like Defeated Candidates. TR 15:05, October 1, 2009 (UTC) ::::Those both sound like good ideas. I just wish changing category names were simple, like changing article names is. Turtle Fan 19:06, October 1, 2009 (UTC) The addition of Curley gives us enough for an ATL split. I'm going for it. Turtle Fan 23:02, September 27, 2009 (UTC) Moving this over here so you can follow my thought process. Turtle Fan 23:24, September 27, 2009 (UTC) Redefining the parameters With certain recent additions, I think we should consider tightening up the definition of what constitutes a "candidate". Most people here were at least their party's nominee for the office. Even some of the odder choices are probably appropriate under that standard. Frederick Douglass was not a willing third party candidate, but he was nominated. Samuel Adams, as I pointed out at the Samuel Adams talk page, he was a "candidate" under the Constitution as it was written in 1796. But some of these others, especially after the 12th Amendment was ratified, are a stretch. We've discussed Barry Goldwater and Abraham Lincoln at their respective talk pages. I see Gideon Pillow here; from what I can tell, he pitched himself as a possible running mate in the 1850s, but was never really close to being nominated. And I already preemptively shot down two governors who were on Ike's short list. When you get right down to it, getting on a ballot for POTUS is rather easy, even if you are some weird guy living in a van down by the river and haven't a hope in hell of actually winning, whereas being a serious VP nominee requires you to hitch your star to a POTUS candidate and actually be nominated by a political party. So I think we should nail this category down to people who actually received a party nomination after 1804; we can be a little flexible for those before the 12th Amendment. Obviously, the ATL category would follow the same definition. And since I've been thinking of this as an almost exclusively US category, we may wish to reorganize and retitle accordingly. The drawback there is that I know the ATL cat also lists some of the CSA candidates HT let slip. TR (talk) 18:17, November 2, 2015 (UTC) :Donut. I think this got buried. TR (talk) 18:37, November 3, 2015 (UTC) :I support the redefinition. As for a national split . . . How many articles would be affected? Turtle Fan (talk) 18:58, November 3, 2015 (UTC) ::Four CSA guys: Hugo Black, Ferdinand Koenig, Huey Long, and Louis Wigfall. Everyone else would go in VPOTUS. Given how rare the office of VP is in the world, especially among the countries HT writes about most often, we might create a general unsuccessful VP ATL category, and make a Unsuccessful VPOTUS (ATL) a sub-cat of that. TR (talk) 19:18, November 3, 2015 (UTC) :I defer to the Americans and / or history buffs here. The suggestion on CSA VPs being a sub-cat of ATL VPs rather than creating a full cat with an OTL/ATL split sounds reasonable though. ML4E (talk) 19:31, November 3, 2015 (UTC) ::Yeah, I also think an ATL cat is best, just in case some random guy shows up down the road. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:33, November 3, 2015 (UTC)